...lost a battle on Advance Wars Dual Strike Mission 8 first time but fought gallantly for 20 minutes. #nowplaying Vladislav Delay - Tummaa for the second time since 3 years ago. It sounds a lot less glitchy than back then but still very interesting and melodically elegant.

My mom had surgery earlier this morning, she's doing great! drugged out on Percocet, but great! had some appendix troubles, seems to be taken care of. Thanks doc!

I told her ".. Percocet is the other heroin, addicts use it. they rob pharmacies & such for it... " LOL. apparently it makes you all itchy.

I'm happy tho. she's alive! I told her I loved her and all that before she went in for the surgery. my mom is dope. she's the funniest person I chill with. she's been cracking me up tons since i was a kid. we've always been like that. I love that about her. that's one HILARIOUS lady, yup.

this song makes me happy too. and I assume momsie feels all fuzzed out about now huh? Beach Slang can get it.

The first thing that strikes me about Kreng's "The Summoner LP" is: this is a record of stark contrasts. Doominess with
hope, drastic maneuver with cloying dronescape. Operating alone the same lines of Paul Jebanasam's "Music For The Church Of St. John The Baptist" from 2011, the music takes frightening crescendo and awashes it with foreboding and disharmony.

Yet "The Summoner" also forgoes shape-shifting to harmonise, too. It reminds of Carlos Castenada's true sorcerer tales in
"The Art Of Dreaming" pbk. There, Castenada told of the assemblage point being something that shapes life as a series of
dreams - not a "living the dream" cliche, but seeing life as an actual, bona fide dreaming construct, where things are not
always quite what they seem, but always indebted with progress and lucidity.

Lucidity is consecutively the next thing to touch on in this music, for that's where the shivers come. Kreng, featured on
Sonic Pieces in the past in EP form, shows himself as beyond the stereotypes of dark ambient or contemporary classical,
fusing a type of randomised mood aerial into his recordings, which are coded and sometimes superseded by an unearthly
dread. Silent film strings, dulcet drones. Highs and lows, gravelly tones. "The Summoner" is like moving over gravel - it
leaves a footprint in your mind's ear and makes you remember that its grounding, and your own grounding, is partly
supernatural.

Genial opener "Denial" is lacking effluence of its title, a brick of drone that breaks into a string cacophony. Yet in the
most minimal way, as the low frequency hum gathers speed and sounds like Mick Harris of Napalm Death solo (Lull). It's lull
before a sudden tide. Having the austerity of experimental classical composer S.Bussotti, "Anger" is more direct, a wall of
creepily slithering noise permeated by pulsular, grainy synths. Hearing this on overhead headphones is a good way to listen.

"Anger" is also the second longest piece on "The Summoner", a nod to the voices within that calm is yet to be besieged for
Kreng. It is a sometimes terrifying asteroid of sound blasting through the output source. Yet as becomes atypical of the
tempo of the release, the slow contours upset the concord by intravenous exchanges of violin, trickling like an opened
ventricle. "Bargaining" sees to that as a whole, whereas "Depression" enlightens the listener. Potently portentous string
drones prove their worth in addition to the muso-syllabic newsfeed feel the LP contends.

The ubiquitous introduction of a refrain to a pretty much bona fide classical album, albeit a different one, resonates as a
unintrusive conduit in the strong melange of sounds. Three and a half minutes in, horn drone fugues recalling Brian Mcbride
combine with the previous atmosphere in the track and push a radical, amorphous agenda, closing down with rickety realism - a silent voice among billions - yet perhaps a voice silenced for a purpose. This all leads into the rather titular, synonym cut, "The Summoning", resuming where Greg Haines got to in his "Digressions" phase, before joining The Alvaret Ensemble.

It's the lengthiest track here. There are also echoes of Gregorio Allegri's "Miserere" as the metre of the stretched string
is never snapped to a sixteenth. It's never back-breaking work, but the gong-like percussion that reverberates and abounds
the foreground certainly adds a certain weight. Revolving retrospectively on words in the scripture of "The Summoner", it is a pulchruditonous exercise put to music, relishing in ghosts of past, but projecting them into the far-off future. 6 minutes pass, it feels like an age of empires. Then a nice guitar line enters before dub synth bass and brighter patterns colour the imagination. In the classic guitar chord for melancholy of D Minor, a rekinetic emphasis on rhythm is created by mixing three counterpoint layers together in bars of eight. Never too mathematical, simply simple terms in sound, before a gargantuous, metal-genre-style fuzz guitar edges out any appearance of silhouette. So do the screams.

"Acceptance" ends a very affecting, uneasily at first and greatly thereafter, album from Kreng with a much shorter 03:30
duration, quite a vignette compared to what epically preceded. A sheltering coastline of sorts, embodying the more gentle,
less virulent strands of "The Summoner", a soft acoustic piano plays an arrangement of chords lightly as a type of memento
to grief, very reminiscent of Keith Kenniff's "For Nihon (Japan)" fundraising music contributions. Also like Mono (Japan),
and their "The Remains Of The Day", it is a perfectly touching epilogue to a fascinating sonic document of summoning, of
living, and most of all, of returning.